Sounds
like an ordinary animated movie, right? Not really. ParaNorman is actually the
first stop-motion movie to use a rapid prototyping machine, a 3-D color printer
that creates objects instead of paper, to produce more expressive puppets. This
allowed the animators to create large numbers of puppets rapidly and easily. The
result is a movie that looks more like an animation than a stop-motion.

Produced
by Laika Entertainment, the production team
used hundreds of layers of fine white plaster-vinyl powder sprayed with ink to create
the 1.5 million expressions of Norman and the rest of the 27 characters.
Norman’s eye rig alone is composed of 40 3D printed parts, which allows the
character to look up, down, right, and left.

The
studio used Canon EOS 5D Mark
II DSLR to film the movie instead of using the traditional 3D format
cameras. Each frame is shot twice; the second shot is taken from a different
viewpoint so when knitted together the result is a seamless animated film.